1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to residential or commercial gas appliances. In particular, the invention relates to the smart gas range appliance that shall be equipped with electronic sensing element and can be remotely controlled by a mobile device. This invention is specifically for residential or commercial kitchen range that is operated with gas fuel. This invention is further related to micromachined silicon sensors or Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) mass flow and gas sensing technology that measures the quality and quantity of gases. The present invention additionally relates to internet of things and the relay to the data clouding and analysis for which the smart range can transmit the data to the cloud via the mobile devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is always desirable to have a controllable device for residential or commercial appliances for safety, efficiency and intelligence purpose. While for an electrical heating apparatus or magnetic induction heating appliance that can provide direct electronic signals it is relatively easier to implement a control mechanism such as adding RFID sensing or temperature sensing elements, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,953,919 to Clothier, U.S. Pat. No. 7,255,100 to Pepper et al, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,951,500 to Smrke. Controlling the residential gas heating apparatus such as gas ranges with intelligent devices or modules is difficult, and relatively less disclosures could be found in literature. Akamatsu et al (U.S. Pat. No. 6,619,613) had proposed an apparatus that incorporated plurality of gas flow adjusting holes and step motors to adjust the openings of these holes such that different amount of gas can be delivered to the heating appliance. However, such an adjustment schedule shall only add the automation features in comparison to the existing vastly used adjustment mechanism with mechanical manual valves. Rothenberger and Weiss (U.S. Pat. No. 6,287,108) utilized a volumetric gas meter to provide the control of the gas opening valve such that the gas supply can be adjusted according to the desired gas volume. This approach is similar to the disclosure by Welz et al (U.S. Pat. No. 6,247,919) where flow meter is used to provide the control baseline for a constant gas supply to an industrial burner. These disclosures therefore provide only the control capability according to the gas flow volume but they failed to response when the gas thermal value associated to the gas supply sources or gas compositions is varied. A constant volume supply at such a circumstance shall hence not be desired. Barritt and Pickering (U.S. Pat. No. 8,475,162) have further disclosed a cooking gas burner system in which a pressure sensor was used to gauge the gas supply and provide data to control a valve that adjust the heat by the gas to the cooking gas burner system. Similar invention to Schultz and Bergum (U.S. Pat. No. 8,635,997) also adapted a pressure regulator to modulate a gas valve or valves together with an inducer air flow fan that shall be also modulated by a pressure regulator such that the gas or gas fired appliance could be operated at its maximum efficiency. Both the above inventions however also would not be capable to measure the gas thermal mass value and the regulated gas volume via the pressure information could be fault to the desired operating efficiency. As the gas supplied usually shall not be identical in its physical and chemical properties from place to place which means that a constant volume control approach would not be able to used when the gas supply changes, which is likely one of the reasons that such appliances are not available at present since in particular the residential gas metrology is realized by volumetric technology only as of today.
Therefore it is desired to have a completed new approach or disclosure of a control device for the gas appliances that shall perform the mass flow sensing with thermal value metrology capability for the desired control features, which adds values of intelligence to the residential or commercial gas appliances such as gas ranges. This device shall be able to work for most of the gas supplies regardless of the gas properties and maintain good accuracy and reliability. The desired device with control features by integrated with both a sensor having the mass flow sensing and gas thermal value metering and an electrically controllable on/off valve. The sensing element of the device shall also be capable of metering or monitoring the gas leakage or a constant flow at a preset level while the device interfaces via the networking with a mobile device that provides the remote control to the device. Further there should not be any safety limitations for the desired device that shall be able to readily applicable for most of the gas pipelines for either residential or commercial gas appliances.